2 October 2011, Singapore – Falling Skies, a new blockbuster science fiction TV series will premiere in Singapore on StarHub TV Ch 525 on AXN Beyond on 3 October 2011.
Here’s an interview with Noah Wyles who plays the lead role of Tom Mason a Boston history professor whose wife was killed in the invasion and the second of his three sons was captured by aliens.
What we love most about Falling Skies is it picks up right in the thick of the madness. Talk about that aspect of the show where we go right to the meat of the story instead of having a season or two of build-up?
Noah Wyle: Yes, it is atypical story-telling in the sense that we don’t start with everyday life going on business as usual and then suddenly everybody’s eyes turn to the heavens and say, what’s that coming in towards our planet.
We pick up six months into what has been a devastating alien invasion and meet our characters already in a pretty high state of disarray, which is kind of exciting storytelling, because it allows you the opportunity to fill in the back story through episodic storytelling and also opens up the possibility of being able to track back in time down the road if it seems (dramatically) appropriate.
How involved is Steven Spielberg in the production of this show?
Noah Wyle: He’s pretty damn involved. His fingerprints are all over it. He was instrumental in helping craft the original pilot script and certainly in casting the pilot. And he came out and was on set when we were shooting the pilot and he made lots of editorial decisions and even drew some storyboards for the reshoots on the pilot and then helped craft the over-arching story for the season, watched all the dailies and made lots of editorial suggestions all along the way in bringing those shows to their final cut. So I would say he was instrumentally involved.
You’ve been very active philanthropically about wildlife preservation so I thought it was kind of interesting that, in a way, you’re doing a show about human’s facing extinction.
Noah Wyle: Yes, we’re the new polar bears, right?
Now, if you were in the position of your character, what do you think you will miss the most in the new world and also what do you think will be the most exciting opportunity about a civilization to start over?
Noah Wyle: I’m guessing a variety of diet will be the thing I miss the most. And hot food. But we sort of tried to (pepper) each episode with exactly that. What are the cons and disadvantages to the state we’ve been thrown into? What are the more subtle pros? It’s seeing a group of kids having to exercise their imaginations at play and the quality of relationships within families being that much enriched without all the other distractions.
There’s a sequence that comes midway through the season where a woman among our ranks who was pregnant and about to deliver. And having been to quite a few of such events, this was unlike any event I had experienced, in the sense that it wasn’t so much about the gifts and the swag and stuff for the impending birth. It was really more about the spiritual aspects of bringing a new life into the world – what your responsibilities are as a parent and what are our collective responsibilities for this new life?
And those, I find very rewarding aspects to the storytelling because it allows us an opportunity to pick and choose between what’s important and what’s not.
I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about Falling Skies feels very much like a feature film. Could you reflect on that for us?
Noah Wyle: It was never scripted to feel like a movie but I think anytime Mr. Spielberg’s name is above the marquee you can’t help but to make a cinema comparison. And it’s got rich production value.
The budget on the pilot was pretty extensive. So we had a lot of bang for our buck and that wasn’t necessarily the case in every episode so I think getting a sense of what the series is going to be like comes probably more accurately from the second half, second hour, than the first.
But, yes, it’s got a very cinematic feel to it.
I really enjoy the family dynamic that’s on it. I was wondering if you could talk to us a bit about how you approach trying to keep your family together in this broken world?
Noah Wyle: Well, dramatically I think that was probably the theme that was most interesting to me. I haven’t had a lot of experience working in the science fiction genre so that had a certain appeal. But I went into this with the confidence of knowing that the spaceships and the aliens were going to be just fine with Mr. Spielberg designing them. And so my responsibilities really fell to making sure the human aspects of the show were as compelling as they could be.
And I found that dual conflict that we set up in the pilot to be really provocative of a guy just trying to keep his family intact and alive being given the larger responsibility of having to care for 300 (veritable) strangers and the conflict between the two is very interesting.
But what’s at the core of the show is once the reset button on humanity has been pushed, these characters, should they survive, are going to become the next founding fathers for the next civilization. What are the best aspects of the previous civilization that you would want to retain and what are the more superfluous or esoteric ones that you wouldn’t mind dropping?
And certainly the notion of family and the quality of human relationships comes to the floor and that’s what I think we pretty successfully explored through the first half of the season.
After all of your years working on ER did you ever have to stop yourself from wanting to jump in and help in any triage type of situations?
Noah Wyle: Oh, I learned enough to know that I didn’t really learn very much at all and that the best thing to do is be a cheerleader on the sidelines.
I have had the misfortune of being first on the scene at a couple of different accident sites and fortunately I had to do nothing more than call 911 and a little hand-holding because I don’t think I could really have risen to much more than that.
What do you think distinguishes Tom as a leader as opposed to the militaristic personalities who step to the foreground to take charge in films such as Battle: Los Angeles?
Noah Wyle: That’s an interesting question. I would say that traditionally, a character like Captain Weaver whose strong suit is leading men who have been trained and focused for battle is the leader.
However, in this particular scenario, most of our military has been eradicated, and it’s a civilian militia that is being trained.
It’s exactly Tom Mason’s back-story as having been a teacher that puts him in a better stead to teach mostly kids how to arm themselves and defend themselves than it is for Weaver to fall back on the military paradigm.
It’s looking at academia and saying that’s a little dry for what we need right now, and looking at the military and saying that’s a little dogmatic for what we need right now, and trying to find a synthesis between the two. That, I think makes my character a leader of a different strength.
Will we see in the first season, Tom’s breaking point?
Noah Wyle: He comes damn close to it. He comes very, very close to it. Yes, I would say episode in the four or five range that’s where he starts to wear a little thin.
Although, you know, there was an adage that we used a lot on my other show. You really didn’t have time to feel sorry for yourself during the course of the day because you had another patient to treat, or two, or three. So you really had to earn whatever private moments you allowed yourself.
And the same holds true for this show that there’s such a constant and eminent threat underneath each and every scene that these characters don’t have the luxury of doing so because there’s just too many other things that need to be done. So I would say that the big breakdown is still coming but we definitely show glimpses of it.
With this post-apocalyptic story how are you, as an actor, able to really get in the character where you believe and you translate that belief to the audience as being isolated?
Noah Wyle: From my own preparation, nothing could be more isolating then pulling a guy away from his family and sequestering him and throwing into Ontario for five months. That’s the tongue-in-cheek answer.
The straight answer is, you know, we’ve watched a lot of movies, we’ve read a lot of books, we passed stuff around from trailer to trailer trying to get everybody on the same page, in terms of trying to find a level of continuity between everybody’s performance, so that we were all playing relatively the same stakes but individualizing them.
We talked a lot about encounters with the aliens serving as metaphors for encountering the worst aspects of our own personalities. So if you stop thinking of them as scary alien creatures which would force you into the limited choices of acting like Fay Wray in a King Kong movie and tried to personalize it a lot more and having them represent something that you really did not want to encounter at all costs. And I think we accomplished that pretty well.
What did you have to do to prepare for the action involved in the show compared to the previous work that you’ve done?
Noah Wyle: Oh, I probably should have done a lot more. I showed up and we all had a couple of days of running around the sound stage and learning gun safety. But in terms of physical preparation I found myself at a disadvantage trying to keep up with Drew Roy who is part springbok.
He plays my oldest son who, very early on, had to run and jump and dive and whirl and roll and do all these crazy things. All of which, eventually, I got more comfortable at. But it’s certainly not wearing the white coat everyday.
Did you find that you were able to do a lot of your own stunts or was a lot of it done by a stunt team?
Noah Wyle: Kind of both. I mean, running and jumping and sliding and diving all that stuff looks so much better when the actors are doing it.
There was one sequence where I’m fighting one of the aliens in a steam tunnel and I did all of that fight with the exception of one throw where the alien sort of chucks me. And that required some wirework to get thrown high up against a wall. I didn’t do that one. That’s the one I farmed out to the double.
And I had to learn how to ride a motorcycle for this show which I’m still kind of terrified by. So I can start one and I can stop one and I can kind of coast through a scene on one but anything requiring any more acrobatics than that I give to the double as well.
There’s a good setup for some brother-related themes throughout with Captain Weaver and the Band of Brothers mentality he has with the soldiers versus the civilians as well as the Mason brothers. Is this something that’s been discussed and planned that – or is it just coming out in the performances as just a natural outgrowth of the story?
Noah Wyle: Relationships especially when you’re starting up a new show, it’s a lot like testing spaghetti.
You kind of throw a bunch of stuff on the wall and see what sticks. And certain relationships have greater resonance than others and certain themes become more pronounced than others and oftentimes they’re not the ones that you expect to pop.
Certainly when we started, it was pretty black and white that I was coming from the humanist angle and Will Patton was coming from the militarist angle, and that we were going to butt heads continually.
And then as we got into the playing of it, Will brings such an interesting complexity to his character and a lot of humanity to what could easily be perceived as a two-dimensional character that it became a lot more interesting to kind of explore the areas of commonality between these two characters. As opposed to the areas of conflict and to see how under different circumstances these men actually might like each other but are forced into opposite camps because of their dueling ideologies.
And the same holds true with characters like Pope where you know it’s this notion of who your allegiance is to. Obviously when you have an external threat from another planet suddenly the divisions between black, white, rich, poor, old and young get erased immediately against a common enemy. But if you take that enemy off the table for a moment and are allowed to take a little bit of breathing room, what are the lessons we’ve learned? Or do we revert back to our own kind of pettiness and clannishness?
And so these are all themes that are worthy of exploring as we go on.
Are you guys consciously spending time developing these characters before you go in to just doing action sequences?
Noah Wyle: Well, you have to be careful about it even just from a production standpoint because obviously action sequences require the most money from an episode’s budget. But if you can buy yourself a couple of episodes by saving on your post-production budget and focusing the drama on interpersonal and character conflict then suddenly on the fourth episode you’ve got quite a large war chest to work with and you can stage something pretty epic.
So there’s a financial necessity that goes into it. But also it’s much more compelling to have the threat come, not as a constant, but in waves. And to have it start off as a huge wave and then be able to get a low to reflect a little bit and synthesize some information, and then to have another wave come. Also the anticipation of that wave coming is great dramatic tension.
“What are the lessons learned after an encounter before the next wave comes?” I think that for this particular show works much better than having it as a constant threat.
Is Falling Skies going to be more for families you think, or how edgy is it going to get? How violent do you think it’s going to get?
Noah Wyle: It’s a really fine line to walk. I’ll use the example of the budding love story between my character and Moon Bloodgood’s character. You know, we tee it up that there’s an initial interest between these two and it starts the clock ticking in the audiences mind about when this is going to get consummated.
And as we were shooting the episodes we were always conscious of the fact that we hadn’t really advanced this relationship at all. So we’d write scenes where I would be on guard duty and she’d bring me a sandwich and we’d start talking about whatever and suddenly it would get a little romantic.
And as we rehearsed them or talked them through it seems like it immediately dissipated the tension and level of credibility for the world that we were trying to establish and that we hadn’t earned that moment yet.
Instead we would play it out probably closer to the way it would realistically play out which is, yes, there’s an interest from opposite sides of the room but these are two very busy people who have to get back to work.
And, as the season progressed and we finally got into the final episode there was a moment that seemed truly earned, very kind of romantic and I think it became incredibly satisfying to have it paced out that way.
But how edgy is it going to be?
Noah Wyle: Oh yes, that was the parallel I was trying to draw which is…It’s a fine line to walk because you want to create a world where the threat is very present but you don’t want it to be so bleak that it turns off viewers who are tuning in to watch more of a drama than a genre show. But by the same token there’s a science fiction audience out there that I think the show would very much like to attract, that is coming with the expectation that this is going to have a lot of epic battle sequences and be a fairly dark and violent show.
So it’s going back and forth between the two. It’s having moments of humanity and hope and humor punctuated by moments of terror and action, and then how we move on from there and get back to the moments of humanity, hope and humor before the next attack comes.
I don’t think it’s going to get much more gratuitously violent than episodes we’ve already shot. I don’t think that that’s in the words but I don’t think we really want to paint the rosier picture of the world prematurely either.
Credit: AXN Beyond
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